


Rooftops

by EmbarrassingLivejournalName



Series: Rooftops [1]
Category: Smallville, Superman (Comics), Superman - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2020-11-25 18:09:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 19,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20916356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmbarrassingLivejournalName/pseuds/EmbarrassingLivejournalName
Summary: Conversations on rooftops.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Does not follow any one comics/movie/tv continuity; I just grabbed the things I liked and dumped the rest.

The first time Lex Luthor met Superman in person was at Lex’s penthouse, on a Tuesday.

Lex had been reclining on the expansive terrace outside his home, watching the sun set in between idly scrolling on his phone. The day had not been a productive one--not for Lex, anyway, but Superman had been busy. At around six in the morning, Lex received word that the man of steel had intercepted a very sensitive shipment, some little bits of equipment bound for one of Lex’s less-than-legal genetic engineering ventures. Science, Lex felt, waited for no man, and it certainly didn’t wait for silly things like laws to catch up to it. 

Unfortunately, Superman felt very different about the matter. He destroyed the convoy, interrogated the drivers, and turned what should have been a routine delivery into a crisis and a half. LexCorp’s secure communication channels lit up as a frantic flurry of calls and messages shot back and forth across the globe. The drivers had talked—Lex could hardly blame them, given the circumstances—and then it was a race against time to scrub the lab clean of data and specimens before Superman sussed out its location. Lex’s people had been successful, but only just. By the time the boy scout’s x-ray vision made its first sweep of the secret, ice-bound complex at nine twenty-four, everything of interest had been purged. Superman razed it to the ground all the same. It was the third time in two weeks that he had gotten in Lex’s way. It was costing Lex money, and worse, it was irritating.

Lex had not embraced Superman’s emergence into the world, but he had been more than happy to let Metropolis’s brand-new golden boy do whatever he liked in terms of cleaning up the streets, hugging babies, and visiting sick children in hospitals. He found it saccharine, and cloying, but largely harmless. Superman made the common people happy and made law enforcement lazy. An inflated sense of security among the rabble did Lex a lot of favors, as it turned out. 

Interfering with Lex’s business, however, was absolutely unacceptable. _ That _ needed to stop, and fast. He wondered just how one went about arranging a meeting with an alien demigod. Send up a flare? Tape a note outside the Hall of Justice? It was a problem that ended up solving itself that very evening, on the terrace, while Lex played with his phone.

He felt, rather than heard or saw Superman approach. Just a funny change in the air pressure while he looked down to send a text, and when he looked back up, there he was: the man himself. The sight did not startle Lex. He barely even blinked. Somehow, a floating alien with a body hewn of marble, scowling down at him while backlit by the crimson sun, was exactly the capper that this day deserved.

The two men regarded each other for a few cold moments. Superman was the first to speak. “Luthor,” he said. 

_ This must be his Stern Hero Voice _ , Lex thought. Superman usually sounded a lot more _ Aw Shucks _ or _ Gee Whiz _ whenever Lex saw him on TV, probably because he was also usually giving interviews about saving puppies, or teaching road safety to kids, or some other asinine thing. Lex squinted up at him. The billionaire had some experience dealing with heroes, so he was not especially alarmed. Batman and Wonder Woman had both made angry, official visits to Luthor-owned properties before, though neither one had dared to show up at his house. Lex supposed that Superman wanted to deliver that patented Justice League Lecture in person. Or kill him. Lex sighed.

“So we’re going to get right into it, then,” he stated.

“We are.”

Boring. “Well, then come down here, so I don’t throw my neck out,” Lex told him. In a show of goodwill, Lex stood from his chair; Superman responded in kind and joined Lex on the terrace. They stood a few feet apart, sizing each other up in silence. This time, Lex spoke first. “You’re taller in person,” he said. When he didn’t get a reply, he added, “Nice underwear.”

Superman’s face went red.

Lex smiled. He had seen enough footage of the alien to know that he didn’t handle going off script very well, nor did he like it when people drew attention to things about him that were not directly related to truth or justice. His own pet theory was that Superman had been raised in some sort of rigorous, yet extremely wholesome physical fitness compound. At any rate, Lex had hoped to ruffle him, and it worked.

“I’m not here to talk about . . . that,” Superman told him, presumably stumbling over whether or not to say ‘underwear’ in front of a stranger. He recovered quickly, though, which Lex respected. Back to business. “I’m here to talk about your lab.”

“Which one?”

“You know which one.”

Lex smiled with the grace born of a thousand press conferences. “I don’t think I do. As you are no doubt aware, LexCorp owns dozens of--”

Superman cut him off with a curt, purposeful step forward. Lex looked up at him. He really was tall. “The one in Greenland making bioweapons,” Superman snapped.

Lex blinked. “_ Who _ would make bioweapons in _ Greenland _?” he asked. 

The alien leaned in very, very close. His face was perfect, shockingly so. Perfectly pissed, as well. “You. Would,” he growled back.

Lex shrugged. “Prove it, then,” he said. For a hot second, he thought that Superman might hit him. Instead, Superman straightened up and gave him an absolutely withering glare. A lesser man, one not raised by Lionel Luthor, might have been cowed. Lex was not. 

“I will,” Superman promised him. He pointed—rather rudely, Lex thought—at Lex’s chin. “You can count on it.” A few long seconds passed. Both men held their position, each waiting for the other to move. To give in. Then the air pressure shifted once again, and Superman was gone, away like a shot into the dimming sky. Lex stumbled a little, jostled by the force of the wake. At the same time, his phone buzzed; it was Lex’s security system, helpfully alerting him to unusual activity on the penthouse terrace. 

Well, that would need to be recalibrated. 

He put the phone into his pocket and swept his eyes across the patio. The familiar contours of his home suddenly felt strange to him. Alien, in fact, because now a very real alien could--and would, and did!--show up at any time. Lex was . . . not nervous, exactly. Energized, perhaps. He studied the exterior of the penthouse, its great expanse of glass and metal almost defiantly exposed. Lex didn’t know about Kryptonite yet, so his options for super-deterrants were more prosaic. Maybe he should go full Howard Hughes. Full Bruce Wayne, even. Block the windows and invest in lead paneling. Cover the thing in cameras and missiles.

“But that would ruin the view,” he said aloud. 

His phone buzzed again. This time it was his bodyguards, alerted by the (woefully inadequate, needing recalibration) building security. Lex ignored it. Make them climb some stairs, he thought. He stood in the waning light and scanned the clouds one last time, before heading back inside.


	2. Chapter 2

As it happened, Clark could not officially connect Lex or LexCorp to the lab in Greenland, nor to the chemical plant in Belarus, nor to the half-dozen other insidious operations he uncovered over the next several weeks. It wore on him. It wasn’t that Clark didn’t know how to accept limitations; even Superman couldn’t stop every fire, or save every life. But LexCorp was a hydra. Cut off one head, and three sprang up in its place. Three . . . or ten, or thirty, a seemingly unending stream of maniacal plots and depraved schemes, and every single one of them pointing straight back to a man whom Clark couldn’t touch. Not within the law, anyway.

No wonder Lex had been so smug on that rooftop.

Clark stewed over it for a while on his own. He reached out to the Justice League and got nowhere. He began to wonder if Bruce and Diana had avoided taking on Luthor in the past simply because dealing with him was too exhausting. Eventually, Clark did the only thing he could do: he went home to his parents.

He showed up at the Kent farmstead on a bright afternoon, a few hours before dinner. Jonathan was out behind the house, ‘repairing’ the tractor, which meant he mostly moved things around and swore at it. Martha was inside, preparing a casserole. One look at her son told her that Clark was in a state--that and the fact that he’d appeared, not at mealtime, in the middle of a workday. She didn’t press him about it. Clark was the kind of boy who liked to tell you things in his own time. So she just greeted him, gave him a hug, and put him to work making a salad.

After a few minutes of watching her son absently shred lettuce into confetti, Martha intervened. “You don’t have to puree it, sweetie.”

Clark looked down at the mess in the bowl in front of him. “Oh,” he mumbled. “Sorry, mom.”

“Why don’t you sit down at the table while I finish this up?” she said. Clark obeyed, and slumped into a chair. Martha began chopping vegetables. The kitchen was quiet, save for the sound of the knife on the cutting board, and the occasional sputter from the tractor—or Jonathan—outside. 

“I saw you on TV again,” she offered. “You stopped that bridge collapse. That has to feel pretty good.”

“Yeah,” Clark answered tonelessly. It had felt good for about thirty seconds, before he had to go level one of Lex’s munitions factories.

Another half a minute passed. Martha finally got tired of waiting. “Clark, are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”

Her son—her handsome, heroic son, who was far too big for this tiny kitchen—let out a long, loud sigh. “I met Lex Luthor,” he said. 

Martha continued chopping. “I thought you already met him.”

“I saw him when I was in the press pool for the stadium thing. And I covered a few events that he was at. But I never met him.”

Obviously, Clark was attaching some importance to this that Martha didn’t understand yet. “Did you meet him as you, or as Superman?”

“Superman,” Clark answered with despair. Martha put her knife down, wiped her hands on a dish towel, then turned to face her son. 

“I take it that this...meeting didn’t go well,” she said. 

“Nope.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked. 

“I dunno.” Martha waited a moment, then began arranging the vegetables in a casserole dish. Outside, Jonathan yelled. The tractor made a terrible, labored sound. 

“He’s really bad, Mom.”

Martha glanced over at him. “Well, you knew he would be.”

“No, I know. It’s just...I mean he’s into some pretty awful shi—I mean. Stuff.”

Martha stopped what she was doing and gave her son a Look. “Clark. You can curse in front of your mother.”

Clark hunched over a little. “No, I know. I know.” Martha squeezed his shoulder, then sat down next to him. This was not a casserole conversation.

“So,” she prompted. “Lex Luthor. Bad shit.”

Clark flushed, and came very close to saying _ Mommmm _ in a particularly whiny way, but he managed to pull it back just in time. “I mean, I expected the regular stuff, right? Like bribery and tax fraud and labor violations.”

“Right.”

“But it’s so much more than that! He’s into _ everything_, and it’s not just big business evil. It’s like, _ cartoon _ evil.”

“Cartoon evil,” Martha repeated. 

“Yeah! Like, okay, Mom, I found this lab of his, right? In Greenland, way up near the pole. He was making biological weapons. And not even normal ones! He had this stuff that could hijack your cells and mess with your brain. Stuff that you could just put in the _ water _ and it would basically turn a whole city into a bunch of zombies. And that was just _ one _ project.”

Whatever Martha had been expecting Clark to say, it wasn’t that. She stared at him. “I . . . but you stopped him, right?”

“I stopped _ that _ thing, right there, in _ that _place. I didn’t stop the plan. I can’t zap the knowledge out of his brain. I can’t even say anything, because I don’t have any proof.”

Another hideous sound from the tractor. Martha barely heard it. “But there’s got to be proof,” she insisted.

Clark shook his head. “There’s nothing. I even went to the League about it. I thought maybe they would have access to LexCorp’s servers or something, I don’t know. But there’s never anything on the servers. Batman basically said ‘Oh he does this all the time’ and told me not to worry about it.” Batman had also implied, in a way that Clark didn’t appreciate, that Clark was being overly dramatic re: Lex’s potential to rule the world via a biological coup. Clark wasn’t going to tell his mother this, of course. He didn’t need Bruce’s murder on his conscience.

“Anyway,” he concluded, leaning back in his chair and giving his mother a baleful look, “it sucks.”

On that, they agreed. Martha reached out and placed her hand on top of Clark’s. “It sure does,” she murmured. She considered herself a decent mother, but most people’s parenting experiences didn’t include counseling their children about how to deal with the specter of a one-man global catastrophe. This was a bit out of her league.

Clark saw the worry on her face and smiled at her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to dump all that on you.” She smiled back, but Clark could see the strain on her face. “And the water’s fine!” he added quickly. “Nothing in the water.”

“Right, yes. Of course. But you’d--”

“I’d find out, and I’d fix it. I’d get you some kind of . . . Justice League Brita or something.” He smiled again, looking tired in that remote, adult way that a parent hopes never to see on her child. “I promise I won’t let Lex Luthor turn you and Dad into zombies.”

Martha didn’t really find this comforting, but she laughed anyway, for Clark’s sake. Inside, her scattered thoughts tangled up on themselves. She remembered all the damage that Lionel Luthor had done while he was alive, and he had just been, what had Clark called it? Big business evil. Practically banal, considering what his son was up to. Was this really Clark’s destiny, then? Driving himself crazy trying to put out all the fires that Lex started? And what would happen if Lex set his sights on Clark? What if he found out about Kryptonite? What if-- “But Batman . . . you said he didn’t seem concerned? He said that--”

“That Luthor does this stuff all the time.” Clark made a face. “Apparently.” The whole situation really did seem like something that the Justice League should look into; at the very least, they probably had enough grounds to put Lex in space jail for a few months. “It’s fine, Mom. Really. I’m just frustrated. I’ll deal with it.”

Martha pursed her lips. She supposed he would have to. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long chapter! I wrote it in one big ol' session (and Google docs and AO3 aren't playing nice with each other in terms of the formatting), so apologies if it's a little rough around the edges.
> 
> Edit: fixed everything, yowza

Weeks dragged into months. The weather grew cold, then thawed. Superman pressed on, defending the defenseless, smiling for the cameras, all with the constant drone of LexCorp and Lex Luther looming in the background. He made a few more stops to the penthouse in the following months, growled out some more empty threats, but none of it ever made any difference. Lex never cared, no matter how much Clark blustered. The poisons and experiments and doomsday devices continued without pause. Eventually, Clark stopped trying to get through to the man, and focused his attention on blowing up what he could, when he could. It was useless, and he knew it. Lex had to know it, too. 

The rest of the Justice League seemed content, even pleased, for Clark to burn out his fuse swatting down Lex’s projects. Diana even thanked him for ‘keeping Luthor busy.’ Strange how the other heroes had immediately gone hands-off with Lex once Clark was available to deal with him.

And Clark did his best, through every scheme. He leveled factories and fought war machines. He shrugged off bullets and rounded up henchmen. But he found his limit at last, while standing in the remains of a death ray in an underground cavern, wiping at the black stain the thing had sliced across the front of his uniform. The sheer, naked absurdity was too much. 

“I’m done,” he said to no one. The people manning the facility had long since fled. “I’m really, really done.” He left the smoking, ruined weapon behind him in a burst of speed. This was it. He was going to do...something. He was going to stop Lex for good.

On the split-second flight to Metropolis, Clark considered how to proceed. Chucking the side of a mountain through Lex’s penthouse was appealing, as was heat-visioning him to death from a mile away. Funny thing was, Lex had discovered Kryptonite not long after their first meeting, and while the vile green rock had made an appearance in a few of Lex’s more sinister devices, the billionaire had not fortified the penthouse with it. Clark could feasibly fly right up and crack Lex’s head open. He could throw Lex into space. Nobody would have to know. Nobody  _ would _ know, except for Clark. And his mom, because he’d end up telling her. And then she’d be mad. Well, not mad. Just disappointed.

Crap. 

He was unsurprised to find Lex waiting for him when he arrived. Lex always seemed to be monitoring Clark’s flight path and trajectory, somehow. Clark landed on the terrace with an aggressive, angry thud. Lex took a look at Clark’s blackened shirt front and raised his eyebrows. “I see we found the mining laser,” he said calmly. 

Clark glared at him. “Death ray,” he corrected. Lex shrugged. 

“My paperwork says mining laser,” came the answer. Clark wanted to throttle him. 

“You always have an answer for everything,” he muttered. 

Lex held out his arms like a sainted martyr. “It’s my job.” 

Clark didn’t respond. He felt like his mother must have when he was little, round about the twelfth time she told him to stop picking up the truck and running around with it. “Why are you like this?” he blurted out. 

Lex was not a man who wasted movements. He grew very still, even to Clark’s eyes. The billionaire was still dressed in his work clothes; he must have broken land speed records to get from his office to the penthouse before Clark did. To meet him here, on the roof. 

“How do you mean?” Lex asked him.

Clark took a deep breath, and it all came rushing out. “Every time I uncover something that’s even a little bit weird, you’re involved in it. You have more money than god. You could retire today and still stay one of the richest people on the planet, even if you lived for a hundred years. A thousand years! But you’re always doing this!”

Lex did not move. “And why do you think that is?”

Clark stared at him. “Because you’re--I asked you!” he shouted. 

Lex laughed--a real laugh, loud enough to startle them both. Clark wanted to die. People did not laugh at Batman.

“Actually,” Lex said, after a beat, “you’re the first person to ask me that. Why I do what I do.” The billionaire’s posture eased. Clark’s did not. 

“And?” Clark prompted. Lex grinned, ready to impart his great secret.

“Because I like it,” he said.

“Oh, fuck you,” Clark snapped.

“It’s true.”

“No, seriously: fuck you.” This was the most Clark had ever cursed at someone. He cursed at things--boulders, broken dams, death traps--but not at people. He started to walk away; why he didn’t  _ fly _ away, he couldn’t say.

“I’m being honest, Superman,” Lex called after him. Clark turned back long enough to glower at him. “Like you said, I don’t have to do any of this. I work on things that fascinate me. That’s it.”

Clark realized that he was not leaving. Had not left. Was still standing on the terrace, listening to this. “So death, destruction, massively unethical experiments--that fascinates you?”

“Something like that,” Lex told him. He paused; the sun had once again begun to set behind Clark, making it necessary for the older man to shield his eyes. “I like physics. Chemistry. Engineering. Research. It just so happens that those things occasionally dovetail into death rays.”

“Mining laser,” Clark snorted. Lex gave him a wicked grin. 

“Yes,” he agreed. He squinted at Clark’s uniform, against the sun. “Did a number on your costume, didn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t tear the fabric though.” Lex seemed very pleased with himself. He leaned forward, just a bit, to examine his work. “I haven’t had the chance to examine Kryptonian weaving up close, of course--except for when you come here to yell at me. I had to guess at the tolerance.”

Clark got an uncomfortable feeling in his gut. The laser had been for  _ him _ ? The whole ridiculous series of ‘mining laser’ patents, the dummy corporation, the secret underground base...all set up just to shoot at  _ him _ ? Jesus Christ. Lex had invested a lot more time in killing Superman than Clark had ever imagined.

“Well, I’m sorry I’m still alive,” Clark heard himself say. 

Lex straightened up. For a sliver of a second, the billionaire looked offended. “Of course you’re alive,” Lex told him. “I was testing your  _ costume _ , not you.”

Clark’s mouth fell open, just a little. “What?”

“Your costume. Obviously, you aren’t going to give me a sample of the material, so I’m reverse engineering it. It’s a very slow process.”

“What?” Clark said again. Incredulity pitched his deep voice up just a tiny bit higher. 

“You really hadn’t guessed?” Lex pressed him.

“No!”

“Hm.” Lex appeared to consider this. He moved again, still trying to find a place where he wasn’t staring into the sun. “Let’s talk,” he said. “You and me.”

“We are talking.”

“No,” Lex answered. “I mean really talk. Cards on the table. I’ve already told you plenty.”

“Go on,” Clark said slowly.

“What’s your endgame here? What’s your goal, besides smashing the things I make?”

Clark folded his arms. “Uh, ideally? To stop you from making them.”

“But I won’t stop.”

“Clearly.”

“And you aren’t going to kill me.”

Clark sighed. “Again, clearly.” 

“And I’m not going to kill you.” 

The roar of a distant jet liner provided an odd punctuation to the sentence. Clark knew that his thoughts were plain on his face; he was nakedly expressive in the best of circumstances, and this was not that. So he just stared at Lex, dumbly. Lex, whose own face was perfectly, placidly inscrutable. 

“Surprised?” Lex asked him. 

Clark was. So surprised that he didn’t say a word, just nodded and tried to figure out exactly which of Lex’s words were lies. Probably all of them.

“I can see that you don’t believe me,” Lex added. 

Clark ground his teeth. “Not really, no.”

Lex fiddled with a stray thread on his shirt cuff. “All right, let’s try going at it this way. I think we can both agree that I’m reasonably smart, right?”

Oh, yeah, they could agree on that. So could the big black streak across the S on Clark’s chest. “Sure.”

“And I’m driven to invent and learn?”

“If that’s what you wanna call it.”

Lex put his hands on his hips. “Well, then you tell me why in  _ god’s name _ I’d want to destroy the single most incredible scientific discovery in history.”

Clark squinted at him. “Are we talking about--”

“You! We’re talking about you!” Lex exclaimed. He went from stoic to animated in an instant, his excitement teetering right on the edge of anger. Clark watched the other man’s heart rate jump, saw the blood rushing through his veins. He blinked, and focused his eyes back on Lex’s face.

“I’m just a guy,” Clark said, stupidly. 

“You are not a guy. You are the most phenomenal thing ever to hit this insignificant little planet, and  _ I want to know everything about you. _ ”

“Uh,” Clark began. Lex plowed forward.

“I want to know you down to your molecules. I want to know how you do what you do. How you are what you are. I want--”

“I want you to stop,” Clark interrupted.

For once, Lex was caught off guard. “Stop talking, or stop--”

“Stop talking,” Clark answered quickly. “I mean, stop everything, but mostly stop talking.”

Lex straightened his back. “All right.” 

“I am not a science project,” Clark stated. Somehow, he’d gained control of the conversation--the first time he’d ever had control in any of their conversations, in fact. “I don’t want you to study me. I want you to stop trying to destroy the world, for even five minutes.”

“I’m not trying to destroy the world,” Lex sniffed. “My projects are ninety percent theoretical.”

“And the other ten percent?”

Lex had returned to his natural, implacable state. “That’s how I make my money.” 

Clark sighed. The sky was nearly dark now. Lex himself was a shadow, backlit by the penthouse windows. “I don’t think we’re getting anywhere.”

“Maybe,” Lex replied. “Oh, well.” Clark could not explain why, but he felt as though a door had just been closed in his face. Lex shrugged. “It was worth a shot. Back to business as usual, then?” Clark’s grunt was the only answer he got. Lex seemed to mull this over, as much as one could mull over a grunt. “Thank you for always watching out for my employees, by the way,” Lex added. “Not every hero would bother to evacuate a factory before he knocked it down.” 

And just like that, Clark had lost control of the discussion again. His mind wandered to just what kind of hero  _ wouldn’t _ evacuate a building. Nobody on the Justice League, he hoped. “Don’t mention it.”

Shadow Lex rocked on the balls of his feet. “Are we done here?”

“Yeah,” Clark said wearily. “We’re done.” He heard himself in the cave, pronouncing the same thing to the remains of the death ray. Amazing how much a man’s confidence could deteriorate over the course of one conversation. Lex was like the opposite of a self-help seminar.

Neither man said goodbye. Lex just moved aside; he’d learned to give Clark space when he took off, after that first time, and  _ this _ time, Clark departed with an extra jolt that made the roof shake. The penthouse and the city fell away beneath his feet as he rose into the sky, past the clouds and the heavens, and out into the stars.


	4. Chapter 4

Lex Luthor did not know exactly when Superman had crossed over from fly in his ointment to all-consuming obsession. The seeds for change had been planted the first time they met, when Superman appeared out of nowhere and flew off into nothing. After Lex had made his calls, and bitched out security (no real reason for that, it wasn’t their fault), he’d sat down to work on adjusting the penthouse’s sensor grid. But he found himself distracted.

Superman’s flight was fascinating. Lex had been around metahumans. He’d even had Wonder Woman fly up into his face. Yet the forces that propelled Superman seemed to be different. They were rougher, more tethered to the physical world as Lex knew it. More accessible, and yet by that measure, more mysterious. A mystery that Lex could solve, perhaps. He doodled and diagrammed into the wee hours of the morning. The sensors were never fixed.

Information trickled out into the media about Superman’s origins: the destruction of his home planet, vague allusions to a childhood spent on Earth. All of it was far too slow, so he started his own investigations. Kryptonite was an incredible find, a life-changing revelation. Lex had only begun to drill down on its properties before Brainiac, that hack, exposed Superman’s weakness to the world during a particularly ill-conceived bit of megalomaniacal nonsense. Lex had thrown his tablet across the room after he read the news reports. 

Superman was a puzzle for the ages, and now every two-bit hack out there was going to try to kill him. Unbelievable. Lex did what he could, reengineering a dozen operations as quickly as possible, in order to draw Superman’s attention away from the rabble and back where it belonged. He had some success--he was able to nail down a very good mathematical model of Superman’s acceleration abilities, for a start--but then Superman got mad about the mining laser and showed up at his house.

Lex dissected their discussion or days. He gnawed at it, replayed it over and over in his mind, alternately cursing himself for saying too much, and cursing himself for not saying enough. Whatever the case might have been, the result was the same: Lex had well and truly fucked up, because Superman was gone. Not gone-gone; he was still all over every type of media, a shining beacon of hope for humanity in its darkest hours. But he was noticeably absent from Lex’s sphere, and that chafed. 

Lex was not a man who reached out to people. He wondered if Superman even realized exactly how remarkable their tête-à-tête had been. Granted, Lex had gone too far, gotten a bit caught up in the moment, and told Superman that he wanted to see his molecules. Not really the sort of thing that a stable person said to someone, but Lex assumed that Superman would let it slide. Instead, Superman let everything slide, and disappeared. Two large purchases of questionable materials went off without a hitch, with the Man of Steel nowhere to be seen. Lex fumed. Superman had to be doing this on purpose. The billionaire never questioned the idea that Superman was still monitoring his activities; he simply assumed that Superman had put him in evil mastermind triage, and that the alien was deliberately delaying any intervention--and thus any interaction--until absolutely necessary.

After a _ missile _ test brought no attention, Lex decided that he had to take action. He considered firing up a satellite weapons array and fucking around for a few hours, but if Superman did show up, he’d probably just knock the satellite out of the solar system and leave again. Lex wanted something more substantial, and so he put a few of his more outlandish projects on hold, as a peace offering. When that didn’t work, he tabled a few more, until fully half of LexCorp’s illicit activities were stuck in a holding pattern, dependent on the whims of a very fussy hero.

Finally, Superman cracked. He appeared back at the penthouse, floating a few yards off the side, while Lex was pacing the circumference of his pool. Lex was so startled that he almost ended up _ in _ the pool.

“Oh,” he said mildly, once he’d recovered. “You’re back.”

Superman did not close the distance between them. After a tense moment, Lex did, and stood at the terrace rail. “What are you up to?” Superman accused.

“Nothing, at the moment,” Lex replied. “Just up here walking around, getting my steps in.”

Superman studied him in a peculiar, quiet way. “Batman,” he said, “told me to come up here. He wants you to know that _ he _ knows that you’re diverting resources away from your usual operations in preparation for something big.”

“Is that so?” Lex snorted.

“That...is what he said.”

Lex considered this. He leaned against the railing, as much as he dared to at this height. “And why did _ Batman _ not come to tell me this himself?”

Superman’s voice was clipped, and something close to annoyed in a very boyish way. “Because he said that I have not been doing my job. So here I am. Telling you the thing that he told me. Please, do not do what Batman thinks you are doing.”

Lex tilted his head. “And what do you think I’m doing?”

Superman paused. He was choosing his words carefully, this time. “I think,” he said at last, “that you are trying to get my attention.”

Lex fought hard against a smile, but didn’t make it. “I think you’re right.”

Superman groaned. The tension in his face evaporated. “God _ dammit _,” he said.

“Sorry to disappoint,” Lex offered easily. “I could try to whip something up, if you want.”

“Oh, no, please, not on my account,” Superman replied. He looked as though he might say something else, but he didn’t. Lex watched him as he bobbed up and down in the air. He then made the mistake of looking down below Superman’s feet, and regretted it when his stomach lurched. Heights had never been a problem, but for some reason, watching Superman’s body dangle out above a hundred feet of nothing made his head swim.

“Are you...going to come over here?” he finally asked. 

“No,” Superman answered. “I’m good.”

Lex rolled his eyes. “Afraid I’m going to probe you if you get too close?”

“Just keeping things a little safer, that’s all.”

The idea of Superman wanting to stay safe from _ Lex _ was laughable. _ This _ from a man who could juggle cars. “Suit yourself.” Lex looked down again, in spite of himself. “Were you ever afraid of heights? Or was that just a non-issue with you?”

Superman’s brow furrowed. “Non-issue,” he answered.

“Because you could just fly down,” Lex prompted.

“No, I couldn’t fly until…” Superman trailed off. “Stop it. I told you: I’m not your science project.”

A ghost of a scowl pulled at Lex’s mouth. “Listen. I don’t think we have to stay in this...intractable situation. I think we can work something out.”

“I don’t see that happening.”

Lex would not be deterred. Not this time. He continued, in his smoothest negotiation voice, “Tell you what. Let’s do a little quid pro quo.”

“No,” Superman said flatly. 

“Now, hear me out first,” Lex insisted. “I ask you one question about your abilities. You answer it, and I take a project that you hate off the board. Permanently. You can even pick which one. Sound fair?”

Superman did not seem moved, but his bobbing slowed. “I get to pick,” he repeated dubiously. 

“Oh, yes.” Lex paused. “And of course, any conversation regarding illegal activities is entirely for entertainment purposes, and in no way constitutes an admission of guilt on my part,” he added.

Superman looked like he just might laugh. “Amazing. You’re serious about this?”

Lex gave Superman his best and most winning smile. “Absolutely.” The alien folded his arms across his chest, deep in thought.

“Chemical weapons plant in Moldova,” he said at last. “You know the one. Shut it down.”

Damn, he _ would _ pick one of the fun ones. Lex held up his hand. “If I owned such a plant,” he said, “I would be glad to do it. Now, for my question—“

Superman shook his head. “Shut the plant down first.” 

Lex feigned offense. “Don’t you trust me?”

“Not a bit.”

Wise man. Lex conceded without a fight. “Fair enough. When you discover that the plant—which I do not own, nor operate—has mysteriously ceased its activity, come back here, and we’ll talk.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for your wonderful comments!! Sorry that this one has taken me so long to finish--it was a lot easier to write a ton when I was on vacation. :P
> 
> I feel like Clark is absolutely the kind of guy whose pop culture knowledge is always a few decades behind at best. I'd blame it on his parents, but even Martha probably watches Real Housewives.

Seventeen days later, the plant was gone, and Superman was back. Lex marked the hero’s arrival with a lazily lifted glass of Scotch. “Everything meet with your approval?”

“I’m impressed,” Superman admitted. Once again, he refused to land, choosing instead to hover a few feet above the patio tiles. Lex had anticipated this. The billionaire positioned himself close to the house and far from the terrace edge, so that Superman would not be able to float out past the railing and give Lex another bout of vertigo.

“Shame about that factory,” Lex remarked. “I hear there was a major safety issue. Had to close the whole thing down.” He shrugged. “It’s a little out of the way, but maybe they can renovate the building. Reopen it as a technical school or something.”

Superman raised one very skeptical eyebrow. “That’s laying it on a  _ little _ thick, don’t you think?”

“I’m just speculating,” Lex responded easily. He moved to one of the deck chairs and sat down, like a king holding court. “Now then,” he continued. “My question.”

“I have right of refusal,” Superman said quickly. 

Lex took a drink. “That wasn’t in the agreement,” he pointed out. 

“No, but I’m not answering anything embarrassing.”

“Define embarrassing.”

Superman made a frustrated noise before giving up. “Just ask your question.”

Lex took a moment to bask in his triumph before continuing. “How,” he said, “do you cut your hair?”

Superman stopped dead in the air. “ _ What _ ?”

“How do—“

“No, I heard you,” the alien interrupted. “I just...you’ve had almost three weeks, and this is what you came up with?”

Lex was gracious. “Humor me.”

Superman made a face. “I...go to the barber?”

“Regular barber? No special equipment?”

“No, of course not,” Superman told him. The Man of Steel was visibly annoyed. Lex ignored it. Enjoyed it, but ignored it.

“So your tissue doesn’t retain its durability after it’s dead,” Lex mused. “That’s assuming your hair operates like human hair, of course, which is a pretty big assumption. I’d need a sample to confirm...”

Superman stared at Lex like the man had fully lost his mind. “This is really your question,” he stated. 

Lex rubbed his hand across his own naked scalp. “I’m not allowed to ask about hair?”

Superman’s cheeks flushed pink. “No, I just thought you’d have something a little more complicated for me,” he clarified.

“I figured I’d softball the first one,” Lex told him. 

“First one,” Superman repeated. “You think we’re doing this again?”

Lex swirled his drink a little. “Why not? Lots of factories out there, after all.”

Superman’s expression did not change, but Lex thought that the other man might have moved a little closer. “Is information about me really that important to you?”

Lex’s face was a mask. “I feel I’ve made that glaringly obvious,” he said. He could see that the Man of Steel was studying him. He thought about Superman’s so-called x-ray vision, and wondered what he was looking at. What  _ could _ Superman see, anyway? “Watching my organs work?” he asked. 

“No,” Superman blurted out, in a way that indicated he might have been. The alien faltered, just for a second. “I’ll think about it,” he said. 

Lex smiled. He felt immensely, almost overwhelmingly satisfied. “Take all the time you want. You know where I’ll be.” 

* * *

Clark had always been a greater good kind of guy. It was one of the main reasons he gravitated toward becoming a hero in the first place. Even if he’d never received the weird message from his long-dead father--even if he’d never gotten the suit and the fortress and the mandate from an extinct civilization--he’d still be out there, doing what he could to help people. Doing his best to make the world a better place.

Which was why Lex’s little ‘quid pro quo’ idea rankled him so much. Objectively, stopping any of Lex’s heinous experiments was a good thing, but did stopping them on Luthor’s terms really even count? Probably not. Lex could just start everything right back up again once he grew bored of dissecting Clark’s secrets. Clark didn’t know why he’d even gone back to speak to Lex at all. Or why he’d given the other man a real answer about his hair, except that it seemed silly to lie about something so stupid. Batman would wring Clark’s neck if he knew, but Clark hadn’t told anyone, not a soul. No one would understand, so what was the point?

That was the strangest thing about the whole situation. Clark had jumped at the chance to join the Justice League, because frankly, the business of being a hero was lonely. Long hours, zero pay, and the constant, crushing realization that you’d never be able to do enough, no matter how hard you tried. He had hoped that being among other heroes would help to patch those holes, but it didn’t. Instead, he felt more alone than ever.

He thought that maybe this was because he was new; while he’d kicked around behind the scenes for a few years before he donned the big blue suit, his time out in the public eye could be measured in months. The other members of the League were well established by the time Clark signed up. Most of them were nice enough, but they already had an established pecking order, and they all had their own monsters to slay. Clark was very much the odd man out. He’d still managed to forge a cordial working relationship with most of the team, but ‘cordial working relationship’ wasn’t exactly food for the soul. And then there was the Batman issue.

Batman  _ wasn’t _ nice. He was a human minefield, all booby-traps and hard edges. The most Clark had ever gotten from the man was grudging inclusion during meetings, plus that one spectacular dressing down he’d given Clark when the latter dared to take his break from buzzing around Lex’s affairs. According to Wally, it was Bruce who had pushed the League to extend its invitation to Clark in the first place, which made his cold attitude all the more baffling.

“If you ever figure him out, let me know,” Wally had said, after Clark pressed him about it. He got the same answer from everyone.

Still, Clark  _ had _ found a friend in the bat family. He and Nightwing had hit it off immediately, partially due to their own very similar personalities, and partially due to Nightwing’s genuine sympathy at Clark having to deal with Bruce on a regular basis. The first time they met, Clark had tried to make a “Dick Clark” joke that didn’t even come close to landing; they had been friends ever since. Clark had no plans to let Nightwing in on the Lex debacle, but he wasn’t above wandering out toward Gotham City in order to talk to someone, anyone, who could do the hero thing and stay a little normal. 

He texted Nightwing before leaving Metropolis, but no one within the hero community really seemed to understand just how fast Clark could fly. Minutes later, he popped up next to Nightwing while the younger man was perched on a gargoyle and nearly scared him off of it.

“Shit!” Nightwing shouted. Clark grabbed his arm before he could fall. 

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Clark babbled. Nightwing started laughing. He steadied himself, then took his phone from his belt and pulled up Clark’s messages.

“Look at this,” he said, holding the device so that Clark could see the timestamps. “You texted me  _ fourteen minutes ago _ . You got here in fourteen minutes?”

“Well, I would have been here sooner, actually, but I had to…” he trailed off as Nightwing stared at him. “Oh. Right. You thought it would take longer.”

“Uh,  _ yeah _ I did,” Nightwing told him. He motioned for Clark to follow him up to a ledge where they could both sit. “Are you just driving Wally crazy?” he asked as he climbed. “Has he asked you to race him yet?”

“Not yet,” Clark answered. The ledge Dick had selected was narrow, but he managed to cram himself onto it. Nightwing fit easily. 

“If you beat him, he’s gonna lose his shit,” Nightwing assured him. “Bruce’ll lose it too. He doesn’t like anybody to be too good at more than one thing. He gets all weird about it.”

“But he’s good at a ton of things,” Clark protested.

“I mean, it’s fine if  _ he _ does it,” Nightwing snorted. “He just doesn’t like it when other people do it.”

“Oh,” Clark said.

Nightwing regarded Clark with something that swung very close to pity. “Lemme explain something about Bruce,” he said slowly. “Bruce is a guy who likes to be in control. He gets nervous when he can’t control something...like, say, a guy who could flatten the rest of the Justice League from space.”

Clark blinked at him. “But I would never do that.” The words sounded impossibly naive, even to his ears. He sighed; Nightwing smiled and shrugged. 

“Look, I know that, and you know that,” the other man assured him. He leaned forward, watching the traffic on the street below. “Like I said. Bruce is...Bruce. Don’t let him get to you.”

Clark leaned back against the building. “I’m trying.” It was awfully confusing when your supposed ally treated you worse than your nemesis did. Although Clark didn’t know if Lex counted as a nemesis or not. “So, Lex Luthor has been a lot,” he said aloud.

“Oh my god, yeah, I bet,” Nightwing replied. “I still can’t believe they stuck you with that beat.”

“Well, I do live in Metropolis,” Clark pointed out, unnecessarily. 

“Yeah, that is not why they put you in charge of him,” Nightwing muttered. 

Clark’s heart sank. “It’s because he sucks, isn’t it?”

“It’s because he  _ super _ sucks,” Nightwing affirmed. “Honestly, Luthor’s a job for ten people. If the Justice League really wanted to stop him--and I’m not even saying that they  _ could _ stop him--they’d all have to work on it full time. But now they have you. One-man army.”

Clark hung his head. “Oh my god.” Suddenly, Batman petitioning the League to let him in made a lot of sense. 

“Yup.” Nightwing shrugged again, then reached out and gave Clark a supportive pat on the back. “Politics, man. It’s a bitch.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait between chapters! I am nothing if not consistent in my inconsistency, womp womp.

Clark headed back to Metropolis just after 2am. He felt a little better, and he knew he should go home--he was going to be a wreck in the morning--but he couldn’t sleep. Instead, he found himself flying lazy circles around the city, watching the paths of fellow night-owls and wandering cars. Clark didn’t go on patrol like the Bat-clan did; his hearing was keen enough to pick up any nearby emergency, so a physical sweep of Metropolis’s perimeter wasn’t necessary. It served no purpose other than to put off the finality of entering his apartment, and the dread of being completely alone with his thoughts.

“Superman!”

Clark almost flew into a building. He veered at the last second--thank god for super reflexes--and listened, hard.  _ That was Luthor’s voice _ .

As a child, when his hearing first started to kick up beyond the limits of what normal humans could detect, Clark had to learn to tune a lot of things out. The constant din of the world--traffic, nature, the churn of human misery--was too much. So he listened for key sounds, and key voices. He could pick up Lois from almost anywhere in the city, for example. He could hear his parents from miles and miles away.

And now, it seemed, he could hear Lex Luthor. Fantastic.

Before he could change his mind, Clark darted across town. As the penthouse came into view, he could see that Lex was not in trouble, unless he was being held hostage by a glass of liquor.  _ I should go home _ , Clark thought again. He landed on the penthouse terrace behind Lex instead.

“What,” he demanded, “do you  _ want _ .”

Lex whirled around, his drink sloshing dangerously in his glass. Despite the hour, the billionaire was still wearing his dress shirt and slacks--but no tie, and no shoes. “Fuck!” Lex said. “I didn’t think that would work.” 

Clark was too tired to be properly annoyed, though he was sure he’d be mad about it later. “Well, it did.”

Lex looked Superman up and down, as had become his habit. “You’re up late. Or do you not sleep?”

“I sleep,” Clark told him. “Do you?”

Lex snorted, then took a drink. “I’m working on it.” He swayed a little. 

“How long have you been ‘working on it’?”

“Couple of hours,” Lex answered amicably. He held up his glass. “You want something?”

“I’m good,” Clark assured him. The naked absurdity of a tipsy Lex Luthor offering Superman danced on the edges of his brain. “Did you call me for a reason, or…?”

“Of course,” Lex said. He paused, but added nothing.

“Well?” Clark prompted.

“Oh, I wanted to see if you could hear me.”

Clark was going to hurl this man to Mars. Lex was not drunk enough that he did not notice Clark’s reaction, and quickly moved to smooth things over. “We could talk about my rocket,” he offered.

“Your rocket.”

“Mm-hmm. The one you smashed.”

It said a lot about the state of Clark’s life that it took him a moment to remember exactly which rocket Lex was talking about. “Oh. That.”

“Yes,  _ that _ ,” Lex confirmed. He gulped the last of his drink, then set the glass on the ground--a risky maneuver, in his current state. “You know, you’re going to set human space travel back a hundred years at this rate. Is that really what you want?”

Clark rolled his eyes. Lex was drunk, but still infuriatingly himself. Maybe even moreso. “What I  _ want _ is for you stop sending viruses into space.” 

“It’s so important,” Lex began, “to test one’s new inventions in a variety of environments, including--”

“No,” Clark interrupted. He sounded like his mom. “I’m not letting you do that.”

Lex did not miss a beat. “No viruses? What about bacteria?” he returned.

“No.”

“Prions?”

“ _ No _ .” It might have been the exhaustion, but Clark was suddenly, perilously close to a giggle. “I don’t even know what prions are.”

“Oh, they’re basically weaponized proteins,” Lex told him. “Fascinating stuff.”

Clark made a face. “Do you like anything that isn’t weaponized?”

Lex’s eyes twinkled. “Almost anything can be weaponized if you know what you’re doing, Superman. Even oxygen can kill you.”

“That’s a hell of a way to look at things.”

“I’m just realistic.” This was said like a private joke between the two of them, even though Clark felt he wasn’t in on it. Lex didn’t seem to notice. “I think I should get to ask you another question.”

“What?”

“Because you wrecked my rocket. Technically, I stopped a project, so you owe me.”

Clark did laugh, then. “That doesn’t count at all.” Lex’s expression conveyed that he didn’t expect to win this argument, and had only started it to...do what? Play with him? “Besides, I already answered one of your questions.”

Lex looked genuinely surprised. “You did?”

“Yes. I told you that I sleep.”

“Oh. Well, fine.” Lex folded his arms. “Pretty boring question, though. You sure you don’t want to try for something harder?”

“Pretty sure, yeah.”

Lex hummed out a sigh. “That’s a damn shame.” They dithered back and forth for another few minutes, until Lex stifled a yawn, and glanced back toward his house. “Look at that,” he said. “You talked me to sleep.”

Clark wasn’t sure if this was meant as an insult, but strangely, it didn’t seem to be. “I think the booze did that,” he said.

“Maybe,” Lex replied. He regarded Clark for a long moment, in a way that made Clark want to fidget. “Well. Good night, then.”

“Good  _ night _ ,” Clark said emphatically, as Lex wobbled into the building. Lex had never put any kind of shielding on the penthouse; they both seemed to know that Clark would respect Lex’s privacy, as much as one could respect the privacy of a man who lived in a giant glass box. It was a curious arrangement. He watched Lex putter around his living room--easy to do, given that the exterior wall was all windows--before Lex gave him a half-wave and disappeared into the interior of the house. 

Clark shook his head. He picked up Lex’s abandoned glass and put it safely on one of the outdoor tables. Then he, too, yawned and headed for home.


	7. Chapter 7

The only bad thing about being a billionaire, Lex thought, was having to spend time with other billionaires.

The world elite was a rarified class by design. It was also a collection of some of the worst people on the planet, a veritable breeding ground for the stupid, the greedy, the banal, and the needlessly cruel. Rubbing shoulders with aristocrats, fellow moguls, and global leaders sounded great, in theory. In practice, it was dull at best. At worst, it was a high-stakes version of the wretched social hell Lex remembered from boarding school. With a lot of the same people, as it turned out. Family money kept plenty of worthless heirs in private jets.

Lex himself had almost become one of those heirs, lost in a sea of sex and chemicals. He’d clawed his way back to shore on spite alone. LexCorp was more successful than the old LuthorCorp had ever been, and before his father died, Lex bought the old bastard out. Lionel had been proud, even as he cursed his son. Lex sometimes wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to die in a club bathroom, rather than stoop to playing Lionel’s game. But the win was worth it, still was, and these days, Lex rarely thought of his father. He buried those memories deep. Only when the toxic sludge seeped out and poisoned Lex’s other relationships did Lionel’s ghost begin to stir.

There were worse ways, Lex supposed, to handle the phantoms of one’s parents. A man could, oh, spend years learning to kick people to death, and then stalk around a major city at night in a ridiculous outfit, stamping out petty crime while his business empire slowly decayed behind him. He could take on a series of teen apprentices and live in a cave. Not that Lex knew anyone like that.

Lex and Bruce Wayne did not get along. They never had, and they had been acquaintances since childhood. Lex did not know if Bruce’s current fake playboy schtick was a deliberate dig at his own questionable past, or just a particularly ill-conceived bit, but it grated all the same. As if Bruce fucking Wayne even knew how to party. Every time Lex saw Bruce pretending to drink and flirt at a charity benefit, he wanted to stab himself in the eye. 

This was why Lex often availed himself of the opportunity to be a professional annoyance to Bruce, in addition to his more spectacular exploits. Recently, the two men had gotten into a bidding war over a donation to the Metropolis Museum of Art, with the goal being for the winner to have a wing named after him. Bruce won; Lex had lost interest, and even though having the Wayne Gallery of Modern Art in _ his _ city was going to be absolutely obnoxious, it had put Lex’s nose onto his next scheme.

Large philanthropic gifts made the news, and the news made it back to the Wayne Enterprises board members, who were more than a little irritated at Bruce’s largesse in the face of yet another quarter of sagging profits. The money in question came from Bruce’s own personal fortune, but the board members saw it as yet another piece of evidence that their CEO’s priorities were all wrong. They complained. And, as Lex always had one ear to the Wayne boardroom, those complaints came right back to him.

Lex owned Wayne Enterprises stock. Not a lot, but now seemed a good time to acquire a little more. And to have a business dinner with a few of the Wayne Enterprises board members, who were themselves rich men, and who happened to be in the mood to discuss very large sales of very large amounts of stock. The words ‘hostile takeover’ might have been mentioned once or twice. To be clear, Lex had no real interest in strongarming Bruce out of his company; Wayne Enterprises was an albatross that Lex did not wish to hang around his own neck. But Bruce didn’t know that. Bruce didn’t need to know that. All Bruce needed to know was that Lex had been circling his board, and then he’d blow his stack. 

The giddy, petty anticipation of Bruce’s inevitable meltdown had kept Lex awake long after his dinner, chuckling and wandering aimlessly through his house. At around midnight, he resorted to drink, and then, on a whim, he called for Superman on his terrace. And Superman appeared. Lex had been surprised, more at the promptness of the arrival than at the arrival itself. It felt right for Superman to be there, and so, he was. 

Lex enjoyed talking to Superman. It was another thing that had crept up on him slowly; or rather, the affinity had been present from the start, but it took Lex’s conscious brain some time to catch up with the rest of him. Superman was not boring, as Lex had initially assumed. He was honest, and his face was painfully easy to read, which Lex liked. A man in his position did not often meet others who wore their emotions so nakedly on the surface. Lex would even go so far as to say that Superman was _ decent _, in that old-fashioned sense. Not a lot of decent people around these days, at least not in the circles where Lex traveled.

He wondered what it would be like to be a little less adversarial with the man, but sadly, that seemed out of reach for the moment. Lex wasn’t sure he’d know what to do with a purely friendly relationship, anyway.

So they’d talked, and then Lex left, and fell asleep in his clothes. The sound of his phone, still in his back pocket, woke him in the morning. Outside, it was still dark; the caller ID on the screen said ‘Unknown.’

Lex knew exactly who it was.

He rolled over onto his back and put the phone to his ear. “Lex Luthor,” he said pleasantly. It was silly--this was his private phone, and only half a dozen people even had the number--but Lex was in a very good mood.

“Yo---on---of a---itch,” Bruce said.

Lex laughed into his sleeve. Bruce was calling from the cave. Not on the secure Bat-Phone (god almighty, this man), but on a cellphone. Cell service inside the Batcave was terrible.

“Bruce, I can’t hear you,” Lex told him. He stretched a little, and finally realized he was still wearing his shirt and slacks from the night before. Ugh. “You’re breaking up.”

“-----------------uck you,” came the garbled reply. Shortly after that, Bruce must have realized his mistake, because the line went dead. Lex looked at his phone, bemused, and waited for Bruce to call back, from the Bat-Phone this time. Which he did, seconds later. Lex let it ring a few times before answering.

“Hello again,” he said.

“Fuck you,” Bruce snapped. His voice was clear now. The Bat-Phone’s connection had always been tremendous. Lex smiled.

“Rough morning?”

“I’ve taken a lot of shit from you, Luthor, but this is the fucking limit. If you have a problem with me, you come and tell it to my face, you understand? This underhanded bullshit--”

“Bruce, I went to dinner with Brian and Nancy because they happened to be in town--”

“Bullshit,” Bruce said again. Oh, he was mad. Lex wished he’d had the foresight to record this conversation, to play over on those long, lonely nights when he needed a pick-me-up. “It’s not enough that you keep trying to murder half the fucking planet--”

“I resent that accusation,” Lex interrupted.

“--but to have the...the _gall_ to come sniffing around _my board--_it’s too much, you know that? It is way too much.”

“I wasn’t aware that bog-standard corporate maneuvering was so far above your pay grade,” Lex told him. “Maybe if you actually attended a few of your board meetings--”

“Fuck you,” Bruce said for the third time. Then he hung up.

Lex was delighted. He waited just a bit, to see if Bruce would call back, but it seemed that this hang-up was definitely final. Outside, the first rays of sunlight began to drift up over the horizon, painting the inside of Lex’s enormous bedroom a serene shade of orange-pink. Lex yawned. It was going to be an amazing day.

* * *

He floated through his morning meetings, a teleconference, and an interminable phone call about polymers that went on for over an hour. Lex spent most of that hour staring out his office windows and doodling funny little armor designs in the margins of a notepad. Nothing special--just a prototype, a real shoot-for-the-stars kind of idea that he’d been tossing around. At 3:17, he was informed that someone had called in a zoning complaint regarding one of his office parks. This was very clearly Bruce being a sulky little shit, because honestly, who gave a fuck about zoning? Nobody, that’s who. But the call got him thinking. Unless Wayne was a prouder man than Lex thought, he would absolutely grouse about Lex to the Justice League--and specifically to Superman, who seemed to be in charge of all things Luthor. 

Lex mulled this over as the afternoon faded. Needling Bruce via Wayne Enterprises was, of course, perfectly legal. Encouraged, even, in a strictly capitalist sense. Did legal-but-annoying actions merit a visit from the Man of Steel? Lex supposed that they didn’t, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that Superman would show up anyway. What was it that Superman had said to him, all those weeks ago? _ Batman told me to come up here _. Maybe Batman would tell him again. Maybe Superman would tell Batman where to stick it.

An ugly, conniving part of Lex wondered if he couldn’t find some way to foster a sliver of division between the two heroes. Bruce was _ so _ abrasive. Lex couldn’t imagine that he and Superman got along, in any capacity.

_ He said that I have not been doing my job _.

Could he do it? Could he crack open the whole League with Bruce as the wedge? It was an audacious plan, and one that, given Lex’s propensity for audaciousness and his inclination toward being a terrible person in general, seemed incredibly obvious in retrospect.

Then again, he’d never had an _ in _ with the League before. Superman wasn’t his friend, of course, but he was so very earnest. What a trick it would be, to use that earnestness, that desire to do right--to stack it up against Bruce’s grating cynicism, and then use it to shatter the League apart. A tour de force of manipulation, a feat that the rest of the League’s enemies could only dream about.

Lex canceled the rest of his meetings. He spent the evening alone, in his office, as Lionel’s ghost uncurled inside his head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew, ok, deep breath. At the risk of spoiling my own shit (and just in case there is a gap between uploading this chapter and the next): I promise that I did not bring you this far to do a rug-pull and end up in Sad Story Land. That is not how we play the Clark and Lex game in this house! Thank you again to everyone who has read and commented. It means the world.


	8. Chapter 8

By the time Lex made it back to his penthouse, it was nearly nine. His nerves were jangled and frayed; he ate dinner, but tasted nothing. He did not drink. The empty terrace outside his windows yawned wide and pale in the moonlight, a dark stage waiting for the actors. Lex sat on the couch, facing the windows, and thought. At ten, he rose from the couch, and flipped a switch inside the house. The stage lit up. 

And then Superman was there.

“Jesus,” Lex muttered. Once again, he thought about modifying the building’s sensor arrays and discarded the notion. His skin prickled as he opened the big glass door; the night was cool, the wind bitter. “How long have you been out here?”

“Not long,” Superman told him. He was floating a few inches above the ground, in Lex’s space but not part of it. There was a metaphor in that, somewhere. “I saw the lights come on.”

“I see,” Lex said. For a split second, the sheer joy of science swept over him. Good  _ god _ , Superman was fast. To see the lights, fly down, and be nearly stone-still by the time Lex’s own eyes caught up with him? It was unfathomable. Lex could not believe his fortune, to stand  _ this close _ to such a being. To know Superman, to understand how he worked...it was the chance of a lifetime. Why couldn’t he just be satisfied with that?

“Did Bruce send you here to yell at me?” Lex asked. The words found their way out around his wonder, spoken by someone else. 

Superman glided closer. “No?” he said slowly. Lex watched him move, taken once again by the simple ease of his flight. Physics equations rose inside his head. “Bruce who?” he heard Superman say. 

Lex’s wandering math ground to a halt.  _ What? _ “Bruce Wayne,” he clarified, flatly.

Confusion, suspicion, and dread all passed across Superman’s even features in a jumbled parade. “I don’t know Bruce Wayne,” he lied.

Lex stared at him. “Yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t,” Superman insisted. “I never--”

“ _ Batman _ ,” Lex interrupted. He didn’t have time for this. Superman obviously knew the truth, and so did Lex, so why insist on the charade? Did he think Lex had him on camera? Did he think Lex was  _ stupid? _ “Look, let’s not embarrass ourselves. Bruce…” Lex trailed off as he examined Superman’s face. The Man of Steel looked absolutely flummoxed. Lex began to put it together. “Did...did Bruce not  _ tell you _ that I know who he is?”

It took an eternity for Superman to reply. “Not...in so many words,” he said.

Lex wanted to scream.  _ Fucking Bruce _ . “Well, I do know,” he snapped. He took a deep breath. Recentered himself, smoothed out his anger. This was not the time to lose control, no matter how much he wanted to march down to the Batcave and suffocate Bruce in his own cape. Besides, this could be a valuable little mixup. “He really didn’t tell you?” he asked again.

“No,” Superman answered. Lex studied him, taking note of the way that stress pinched his brows and hardened the line of his mouth. A vague sense of guilt crept in around Lex’s gut.

Superman watched him back. Lex assumed the other man was trying to feel him out, see where Lex was going.  _ Good luck with that. _ “How uh...how did you figure it out?”

“Oh, there wasn’t any figuring,” Lex told him. “We grew up together. It’s not like you can’t tell who he is under the mask. Besides, who else would do--” he waved his hand dismissively, “--all that?”

Superman laughed a little. Lex smiled, mirroring his expression. “He has a dummy corporation set up to manage his licensing for all the bat stuff, you know. He monetizes all of it.”

“He does not.”

“He absolutely does. It’s the only part of his business that isn’t a disaster.”

Superman considered this. He was standing on the patio now, feet flat on the floor. “Then why hasn’t anyone else found out?” he asked. 

Lex remained casual, noncommittal. “I’m sure someone has, but it’s very hard to untangle. Not many people bother to look.”

“You did.”

“Of course. I look at a lot of things.” He smiled again, then took a step back, as if intending to return to the house. This time, the Man of Steel mirrored him, and stepped forward. 

“Like the other members of the League?” Superman pressed.

“Sometimes,” Lex said mysteriously. “If they interest me.” He intended to say more, but a funny little glint of light opposite the windows caught his eye. He turned his head. It was his glass, the one he’d left on the ground the night before, now sitting happily on a poolside table and reflecting the terrace lights. 

Lex stared dumbly at the thing. He hadn’t moved it. He knew he hadn’t. And the maids didn’t come until Thursday. His attention shot back to Superman, who balked at the sudden change. “Did you pick up my glass for me?”

“Huh?” Superman answered. He leaned around Lex to look at the table, even though he could have just looked right through him. “Oh, yeah,” he said sheepishly. “I didn’t want you to kick it if you came back out.”

Lex fell silent. _ A decent man _ . One of the bulbs near the door flickered. 

He did not know how long he stood there, studying a plain drinking glass while an alien god waited beside him, but it was long enough for Superman to theater-cough and ask, “Are you all right?” 

Lex blinked. Sounds and senses came rushing back to him. “Fine,” he said quickly. Superman did not seem convinced. Another long, quiet moment passed, while Lex’s thoughts meandered across broken empires and simple kindness. Superman coughed again. Lex looked up.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

Superman tilted his head. “I told you. I saw your lights come on.”

“Bruce didn’t send you.”

“No.” Superman paused. “Should he have?” 

Lex felt an uncharacteristic heat begin to spread across his face. He was a  _ rat _ . A petty, self-absorbed little rat, scheming in the dark, bothering a good man who moved mountains and picked up after rich, drunk garbage. “No,” he said. “We just...we got tangled up in some business bullshit this morning. Stupid stuff.”

“Oh, of course.” For once, Superman’s face was difficult to read. “Are we talking  _ legal  _ business bullshit?”

“Everything I do is legal,” Lex said automatically.

Superman’s blue eyes flicked over Lex’s body. Lex realized that his heart was doing calisthenics in his chest.  _ Christ,  _ he thought. _ He can see it. _

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Superman asked again.

“Absolutely,” Lex answered. He pursed his lips. “You really just came over here, for no reason?”

Superman folded his arms, but then visibly let down his guard. “All right. I  _ might _ have overheard something about you and Wayne Enterprises,” he admitted.

Lex leaned back a little. “Is that so.”

“Yeah. And I mean, you do like to talk. I thought we might, you know. End up on the subject.”

Lex made a sound halfway between a grunt and a sigh. “Well, we did, so. Congratulations.” Superman uncrossed his arms. He was clearly frustrated, though Lex did not know why. 

“I’m not trying to like,  _ win _ here,” Superman informed him. “This isn’t a contest.”

Lex bristled at that. Something about the tone of his voice. “Everything is a contest.”

“If you want it to be.”

Lex gave him a dark, ugly look. “Do you want to know my plans for Wayne Enterprises, then?” he asked. 

“Do you actually  _ want _ Wayne Enterprises?”

The flickering bulb by the door gave out, dropping a pool of shadow down between the two men. Lex glanced over at where the light had been. “Why wouldn’t I want it?”

Superman responded as though the answers were more than obvious. “Wayne Enterprises is mostly real estate, and they’ve missed their earnings forecast three quarters in a row. Plus, WayneTech’s already sold most of their patents. There’s nothing there to interest you.”

Lex could not define the emotion that welled up inside him. He was deeply, profoundly impressed. Superman was a perfect student, acing a quiz that Lex himself did not realize he had written. “There is the personal angle,” Lex murmured. “I could just want to bother Bruce.”

Superman was not swayed. “You can do that for free,” he pointed out.

Lex laughed, a booming peal of sound that rang out across the terrace. “Well done,” he said, and meant it. “Well done.”

Superman seemed very amused, maybe even proud. The poison in Lex’s brain tried to bubble up again. 

“You might have a future in finance,” Lex remarked, once he got his bearings back. “I’m always looking for good people.”

“Oh, I would,” Superman assured him, “except I already have this one job that I’m kind of stuck at. Keeps me up at weird hours. No time for anything else.”

Lex laughed again. “That’s a shame. Does it pay well?”

Superman snorted, shook his head. “The pay  _ sucks _ .”

“You should charge per natural disaster.”

“That’s... _ so _ immoral,” Superman chuckled. 

“I’m just looking out for you.” Lex felt the strain of the day start to bleed out of him. It was strange, just talking like this--letting the conversation happen, rather than trying to drag the dialogue around by force. “Anyway. I suppose you’ll want me to tell Bruce what I’m up to?”

Superman raised one very skeptical brow. “Would you ever do that?”

Lex smirked. “No,” he answered. “Do you think he’d ever listen to me?”

Now it was Superman who laughed. “No,” he said emphatically. 

“Does he listen to you?” Lex asked.

“No.”

“He should. You’re smart.” Lex wasn’t sure if this statement qualified as manipulation, since it was also a fact. The billionaire did not hand out compliments lightly. In general, he only deployed praise on a strategic basis--to flatter, to charm--as most people didn’t deserve it. Superman did, but even so, the comment made the great bulk of his shoulders slump. Lex had hit a nerve.

“I’m basically a glorified intern,” Superman confided. Lex clenched his jaw. Perhaps Superman didn’t understand Lex so well, after all. If he did, he would know that Lex was a predator. It was beyond dangerous to reveal any kind of weakness to him. This was  _ excruciatingly _ common knowledge, which was why Lex had to work so hard at disarming his targets. His entire family history screamed at him to pounce on this new detail. Instead, he swallowed hard, and took a shot at empathy.

“That’s a shame,” Lex stated. He didn’t know where to go after that, so he added, “What do you do? Type and light file?”

“No. I mean, I know how to, but no.”

The image of Superman hunched over a tiny little desk, writing memos for Aquaman inside a Hall-of-Justice brand cubicle, passed through Lex’s head anyway. He put his hands in his pockets and shivered at a gust of wind. Should have brought a jacket. “Well, if you ever do get tired of the hero beat, give me a call. I’ll pass your name along to HR. No promises, but I think I can get you an interview.”

Superman hit Lex with that megawatt, media-darling smile. It was positively arresting in person. Lex wondered how anyone—anyone normal—didn’t simply die in its presence. “I’ll think about it,” Superman said. “You should go inside, though. You’re cold.”

Lex considered lying, but it was pointless against a man who could see your circulatory system. “I can get a coat. Or turn on the outside heaters.”

Superman rubbed at his face. “Aren’t you tired?” he asked, after a beat. “ _ I’m _ tired.”

Lex checked his watch. “It’s not even eleven.”

“I was up late.”

_ Oh, yes. Right _ . Lex looked over at the glass again. He wondered if the maids would let him leave it there. He supposed he could leave a note about it.

“Go home,” Lex said. “Go to sleep. Come back tomorrow--I’ll see about that interview.”

“Sure,” Superman replied. “I’ll update my resume.”

“Bring two copies,” Lex reminded him. 

“Can’t I just e-mail it?”

Lex laughed. “Sure.” He saw Superman off, which consisted of stepping back--mind the wake--and watching him fly away. Then he headed back to the house, under the burnt-out light, and shut the door.


	9. Chapter 9

Secrecy was a funny thing. 

Clark had been raised behind a veil of secrets, a veil pulled tight around a little Kansas farmhouse where love and fear often intermingled. Against overwhelming odds, Martha and Jonathan had managed to raise their boy well. They taught him to to look for the best in others, even as they reminded him that the world, and the truth about who Clark was, could never really meet. To say that Clark’s parents supported his public career path would be overstating the matter; they wanted him to be safe, and happy, but Clark was Clark, and someone with his abilities and drive couldn’t stay hidden forever. So they did the best they could--to love him, to guide him, and to prepare him to live a life that was necessarily one step removed from the rest of humanity.

Despite all this, Clark was not a lonely child. He went to school; he was personable and fairly popular in their small community. Friends and girlfriends were never in short supply, though Clark found more success with friends. A friend, even a good one, was someone you could keep at arm’s length when you needed to, and Clark’s secrets required that escape hatch. A romantic partner brought a higher level of risk--the potential for real love, and the possibility that Clark would need to open up their tiny family bubble to the presence of an  _ other _ . It was something that he felt he should want, but had never been prepared to do. He had even been nervous about revealing himself to the Justice League, despite the fact they were literal heroes, and keepers of secrets themselves. 

It was strange, then, to be an honest person--and Clark considered himself to be honest, often to a fault--who spent most of his days lying to the people around him. Telling Lois that he left his phone in his car and missed her call, when he was really defusing a bomb on the other side of the planet. Listening to Jimmy marvel over how Superman did this or that, while Clark tried to figure out if the shouts from eleven blocks away meant that he needed to get out of the office and fix something that instant. Maybe that was why he’d picked such a lousy disguise for his civilian self, and refused to wear a mask when he was in the cape; maybe he wanted to be found out.

He had been certain, in the beginning, that his secret identity would last about thirty seconds, maximum, before someone put it together. The idea that a thick pair of glasses would make him unrecognizable to the rank and file was ludicrous on its face. Martha in particular had been aghast that her son thought black plastic frames would be enough to separate the  _ super _ from the  _ man _ in the eyes of the public. But it worked. Most people who saw Superman just saw the symbol. They were so in awe at the idea of him that they barely even looked him in the eye. Even those who knew him--Lois and Jimmy, who had managed to interact directly with Superman on more than one occasion--were fooled, because the human brain wasn’t prepared to meet Superman outside of a crisis. It was not prepared to see the last son of Krypton wearing regular clothes, attending afternoon meetings, and fucking up the third-floor copy machine. Nonetheless, Clark didn’t dare spend more than a little time with his coworkers outside of the office. The more they saw of him, the more they might see him, for real. Clark couldn’t risk it.

These days, the only person he talked to for any length of time was Lex, up at that blasted penthouse hung halfway between the earth and the sky. Lex, who was impressed by his abilities, but never overwhelmed by them. Lex, who was always, always watching too closely and listening too carefully to the babble that came out of Clark’s mouth. 

The two strange nights in a row, where Lex was drunk and then Lex was...something else, marked a little swerve in how the men interacted. They were not friends--Clark didn’t think they could ever be friends, at least not while he was still having to blow up one of Lex’s designs every other week. But they seemed to compliment each other on some level, and Lex had slowly relaxed his grip on their conversations, until the words between them flowed almost naturally. Clark could see how Lex charmed people; he was a tremendous actor, and almost always ten steps ahead of wherever Clark was. He was so difficult to pin down that Clark wondered if the occasional cracks in his facade weren’t intentional: brief shows of vulnerability meant to draw Clark in. The thing everyone said--from the Justice League, to the hundreds of articles that had been written about Lex Luthor over the course of his lifetime--was that trusting Lex about anything, no matter how small, would absolutely result in ruin.

And yet, Clark kept going back. Again and again, as days and weeks and months crawled on, he returned to the penthouse, to Lex, and kept the game alive.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the second short chapter in a row, but I promise that we're heading to somethin big verrrrry soon. 8)

Repeated late nights were fine if you were twenty-two, or an obsessive, bat-based vigilante, but Clark and Lex were neither. A grown man needed sleep, and so they sometimes spent nice afternoons together on the LexCorp roof, passing an hour here and there on the great concrete expanse between whining hvac units. It was a utilitarian place, not meant for socializing. It also didn’t offer seating, and so, after a few sessions where Clark floated and Lex stalked around like a cat, Clark had brought up two cheap folding chairs. Watching Lex park a five-figure designer suit on top of a ten-dollar aluminum chair was its own little thrill. Lex had laughed when Clark told him that. 

Clark, meanwhile, was learning to control his flight better. His wake no longer knocked Lex off balance, and he could now augment his natural ground speed with a flight boost, without destroying everything around him. He showed this off, unintentionally, by catching a highball glass that Lex lost his grip on when the billionaire gesticulated too hard. 

“All right, that was impressive,” Lex had said, as Clark returned the glass to his hand. 

“Lex,” Clark pointed out, “you’ve seen me stop a train.” Not in person, but Lex had seen the video. Lex had showed  _ Clark _ the video.

“It’s the little things,” came the answer. From then on, the glass drop became Lex’s way of making sure that Clark was paying attention when they talked. One night back at the penthouse, after Lex had repeatedly dropped a full tumbler of Scotch, Clark finally protested. 

“I’m not a dog, Lex.”

This caught Lex off guard. He was absorbed in thought. “I’m sorry?”

“That’s the fourth time you’ve dropped this in ten minutes.”

“Oh!” Lex waved Clark’s annoyance away. He held the glass in front of him—Clark had made the mistake of giving it back—and motioned to it with his other hand. “I’ve noticed something.”

“Have you,” Clark said flatly. 

“Yes! You never let the liquid spill.”

“I assumed you wouldn’t want me to.”

“Oh, I don’t care about that. You can dump Scotch all over my patio if you want. The point is, I was wondering how you did it.”

“I catch the liquid in the glass?”

“Yes, obviously.” Now Lex was annoyed. Clark felt a tiny spark of victory. “But you can’t just catch a liquid like that, can you? Once it hits the glass, it starts to splash. So I was wondering how you managed to compensate for that.” Clark watched the irritation fade from the other man, replaced by the pure excitement of discovery. “I kept thinking that maybe I was just missing something, because nobody could be fast enough and controlled enough to grab a falling object and fight fluid dynamics before the whole thing went to shit. And then I saw it. This little extra blur, right at the end, which was you moving the glass around to corral the drink back into it in midair. It’s incredible! How did you learn that kind of precision?”

Clark shrugged. “I spilled things a lot as a kid?”

Lex gave him a look that was overflowing with exasperation, then considered the answer. “So you’re telling me you just learned it, on your own?”

“Yeah, eventually. Took some practice.”  
“I’ll bet it did.” Lex studied the glass in his hand, then put it down in a very deliberate manner, complete with a slight ‘tadaa’ gesture at the end, to demonstrate that he was done playing with it. “Is your speed--and you may not know this, I understand--is it, _was_ it typical of people on Krypton? Was the whole planet like you?”

“I don’t know,” Clark admitted. Lex was never sentimental about Krypton, except to mourn the loss of what would have been a mountain of information. In a way, that detachment was comforting. Clark didn’t know how to feel about his ‘home’ planet, since he’d never even seen it. His biological parents were just holograms in a fortress of ice. Sometimes, he could just about understand the edge of the tragedy, or comprehend a sliver of the emptiness that Krypton’s destruction left behind. But the scope of the thing was too big, the heartache too far removed. Most of the time, he felt nothing at all.

Lex was up and walking around, back and forth in Clark’s peripheral vision. “What’s your natural speed?” he wanted to know. “Is the rest of the world just hideously slow to you?”

“No, it’s normal,” Clark told him. The rest of the Justice League would clean his clock for giving away this kind of information, especially for free. And Clark would deserve it-- _ quid pro quo _ had happened exactly once, before he and Lex gave up and started rambling at each other. “If I’m on my own, I move a little faster, but I was raised here, so. I’m used to it.”

This answer seemed to satisfy Lex, who was likely musing whether or not Krypton was a planet of people who walked like they had frames missing and talked like chipmunks. Lord knew Clark had wondered about it. Jor-El’s hologram spoke at a regular human speed, but for all he knew, the hologram’s AI had adjusted it so that it would be ‘correct’ for Earth.

“Come over here,” Lex said, and Clark did, automatically. Lex was standing next to the pool, lined up with the longer side. He pointed toward the far end. “That’s about thirty feet. Just...walk from here to the other end, at your natural speed.” Clark obeyed again. The world around him slowed--he could see the dust particles frozen in the air, hear the long, slow rasp of Lex’s breathing beside him. He walked, stopped, and turned. After a moment, the world caught up.

“Fuck!” Lex shouted. He jogged to where Clark now stood, barely able to contain himself. “ _ That’s _ normal?”

“Yeah,” Clark answered. “Was that fast?”

“Was it--Superman, do you have any idea--god!” Lex began to pace again, punctuating his words with short, fast steps. “What I wouldn’t give to get you on camera. I have a high-speed rig in my lab--my personal lab--if you ever--”

“No,” Clark said. He was friendly, but firm. He had to leave some lines uncrossed.

Lex was disappointed, though only for a moment. “I’ll get you,” he said, his eyes shining brightly. On the surface, the words were ominous, but Lex sounded less like a plotting villain and more like a friend promising to win the next round of a prank war. Clark felt himself smiling as Lex went back for his drink. “One of these days,” the billionaire called over his shoulder. “One of these days, you’re gonna say yes.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello again at last! thank you to all of you who stuck around; the only cruddy thing about being an adult is that you just never have enough time to do the fun stuff. i hope the new chapters will be worth the wait!
> 
> edit: slowly going back and fixing some typos/shitty writing in this, god almighty

A week of steady rain held Metropolis in its gray embrace. Lex and Superman had never bothered to discuss an inclement weather policy, and so Lex found himself without his favorite sounding board for eight long, monotonous days. This should not have been a problem--Lex was an island unto himself--but lately, the billionaire had not enjoyed being alone with his thoughts. They had begun to wander in strange directions, through tangles of memories and half-formed desires, uncontrollable and wild. Lex Luthor had spent years cultivating a pleasing numbness in his soul; now it was coming apart around an alien and a smile, and the fallout was . . . unpleasant.

Lex stood in his penthouse, looking out at the city, her buildings and her lights distorted through water and steam. It was late, and he was tired, but his father came to him in dreams. Lex would not sleep until he had to. 

A heavy splash and a wave of water against the window glass snapped him back to the present. Directly outside the terrace door, Superman skidded to a halt, real and gorgeous and soaked to the bone. “Sorry!” the big man shouted from outside, as the rain pounded down around him. “I came in too hot!”

Lex didn’t care. He rushed to open the door. A gust of wind sent a sheet of water around Superman’s bulk and into Lex’s face.

“I’m so sorry,” Superman said again. “I saw you at the window, and I know it’s kind of like, a little stalkery, but I thought--”

“Inside. Come inside,” Lex interrupted. Heavy red boots crossed his threshold; Lex slammed the door shut behind them, ignoring the lake pouring from Superman’s cape onto the hardwood floor. The two men paused, and looked at each other.

Superman was inside Lex’s house.

Lex felt a rush of _ something _ go into his chest. Superman pushed his sopping hair up off of his forehead, and Lex noticed, for the first time, that Superman’s hair was curly. The Man of Steel usually had his hair slicked back with some kind of industrial-grade pomade--possibly a Kryptonian compound, as nothing on earth could maintain a perfect hairdo at superhuman speeds. Lex found himself staring, stupidly.

“Do you uh, have a towel?” Superman asked. He gestured to the rapidly expanding pond at his feet. 

Lex’s eyes followed the motion, but it took his brain a moment to catch up. “What? Oh. Yes. Wait there,” he said. Lex had towels. Lex had lots of towels: towels that he never picked out, bought by assistants whom he never met. A metaphor for Lex’s life if he’d ever heard one. He darted to the hall closet and came back with an armful. 

Superman eyed them dubiously. “Those look, uh. Expensive.”

Lex made a face. “Of course they’re expensive,” he replied.

“I mean, do you have an old towel, or a rag, so I can dry the floor?” Superman clarified. He seemed very earnest about it.

Lex rolled his eyes. He stuffed one of the towels into Superman’s hands and then crouched down to sop up the mess on the floor. 

“Man, if my mom could see this,” he heard Superman mutter. Lex smiled. They’d talked about their parents, on occasion; Lex knew that Superman was raised on Earth, by people who sounded too good to be true, but not much beyond that. Any deeper conversation would require reciprocity, and Lex was not prepared to speak to anyone about Lionel. Even changing the subject or shutting the discussion down came too close to the matter.

Still, Lex couldn’t help himself. “Would she have more to say about the towels, or me cleaning up your mess?”

Superman thought about this. “I want to say you, but probably the towels,” he answered. Lex laughed, and got back to cleaning.

After a few minutes of wiping at the hardwood, Lex concluded that his towels were indeed luxurious, but about as absorbent as a rock. He wasn’t doing much more than spreading the water around in a bigger circle. He glanced up and saw Superman scrubbing his own towel at his hair. Watching him. “My uniform will dry on its own,” Superman offered. “Usually only takes a couple of minutes.” That brought Lex’s eyes back down to the blue fabric hovering in front of him. Sure enough, the strange weave was _ pushing _ moisture out through its fibers. Lex leaned closer.

“That’s incredible,” he murmured. Efficient, directed capillary action--and the fibers themselves were wound together in a way that Lex had only guessed at, with an intricate geometric pattern unlike any textile on Earth. Lex had seen that pattern before, repeated in the fragments of information he’d managed to scrape from the scattered echoes of Krypton’s transmissions. The ghosts of a civilization, scattered across the galaxy.

“Uh,” Superman said above him.

Lex’s head snapped up. He was far too close to Superman’s thigh, and one wrong move would put him directly into the Man of Steel’s crotch. Superman’s expression revealed that he, too, was acutely aware of this fact. “Pardon me,” Lex blurted. He stood--smoothly, but _ very _ quickly--and stepped back. “I got--the weave, I’ve never seen it up close--”

Superman’s face was flushed, and his laugh was one of obvious relief. Lex wanted to throw himself out a window. Superman reached up and unhooked his cape from his shoulders, then twirled it off like a matador and offered it to Lex in one easy motion. Lex blinked at the thing. Sure enough, the cape was dry. 

“Here,” Superman pressed. “You can look at it, if you want to.”

Oh, Lex did want to. Lex had never wanted anything more in his entire life. He wanted to feel the weight in his arms, manipulate the fabric under his fingers, and run a sample through every single piece of equipment he could find. Even a sliver of a pristine Kryptonian artifact like this could occupy him for days. Weeks. _ Years _.

Lex hesitated for a fraction of a second. A regular person might not have noticed it, but he knew that Superman would. Slowly, gently, he ran his hand over the cape. Alien material, unknown to science, slid smoothly against his skin. He thought again of the overwhelming impossibility of this--of the cape, of the man in front of him, of the woman Superman called mother. He thought of his own mother, and the last time he could remember being happy. 

“Maybe later,” he said aloud. Rain pounded down outside, harder than ever. Lex swallowed, and motioned to the couch. The floor was soaked, Superman was _ here _, and Lex was not alone. “Would you like to sit down?”


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for anyone who thought the last chapter was too short, here is a giant beast of a thing that ABSOLUTELY got out of hand.
> 
> this could use another editing pass, but if i read it one more time, i'm going to lose my mind

“Did you ever date civilians?”

It was midnight in Gotham City. Nightwing and Clark sat together on the edge of the Gotham Bank tower sign, eating sandwiches.

Nightwing smirked at Clark from under his mask. “ _ Civilians _ ,” he repeated.

Clark snorted. “You know what I mean. Non-heroes. Regular people.”

“Sure,” Nightwing answered. “I mean, not seriously. Not lately, anyway.” He shrugged. “It’s kind of a hassle.”

“Yeah,” Clark agreed with a sigh. “It seems like it would be.”

“I mean, if you just wanna hook up, then sure, no problem,” Nightwing added. “Anything past that and stuff gets messy. I usually bailed after a couple months. Too many questions I couldn’t answer.”

Clark nodded. “Did you ever want to tell any of your girlfriends about--” he waved his hand vaguely in Nightwing’s direction, “--all this?”

“Nah. Like I said, I usually bailed. I guess there were a couple of times, when things could have gone that way. But I chickened out.” Nightwing studied his sandwich for a moment, then shot Clark a sympathetic, knowing look. “Why, you got your eye on somebody?”

“No,” Clark said quickly. He laughed, mostly at himself. “No, just thinking about it.”

* * *

Lex’s penthouse smelled like him. Like his aftershave, specifically, mixed with notes of soap and booze, all of which were ever-present to Clark’s overclocked nose. He wondered, sometimes, why his most distracting senses had to be dialed up so high. It didn’t seem fair.

As for the penthouse itself, it remained something of a mystery. Clark had never made an x-ray survey of the building; doing so seemed like a massive invasion of privacy, and he felt slimy whenever he thought about it. All he knew of the layout was what he could see from the outside, through the windows—though considering the sheer amount of windows, that was still a lot. During the day, the penthouse reflected sunlight like a diamond; at night, it lit up like a brilliant, glowing box. Clark knew that every feature of Lex’s home was a marvel of engineering, because Lex had told him so, but the whole thing reminded Clark of a terrarium. Or a hamster cage.

And now Clark was standing inside it.

Despite the rain, Clark wondered if he shouldn’t have just stayed outside. They had been so careful, the two of them, to keep their lives separate in the ways that mattered. It wasn’t until Lex closed the door behind him that Clark realized he’d broken another one of their unspoken rules. That they’d both broken it, together.

Clark could almost hear every good and practical influence in his life shouting at him to run, back out the door and into the sky and away from the awful, magnetic lunatic who kept dragging him down into his orbit. The amount of lines he had crossed when it came to Lex were piling up high behind him. Eventually, someone was going to notice, and then what? Did the Justice League fire people? Did they do  _ worse _ ? Clark used to fantasize about hurling Lex into the Phantom Zone; maybe he should hurl himself there, too.

In the meantime, Lex had Clark off balance yet again, because of coure he did. Clark was not at all prepared for the cavalier way in which Lex treated his own property, nor was he ready to process Lex hovering weirdly around his legs, or rejecting the offer to study his cape. For a hot second, Clark saw that maniacal fire blaze in Lex’s eyes, and he envisioned a long evening of fumbling at answers to questions about Kryptonian manufacturing processes, before he had to rip his cape back from Lex’s grasp and leave for the night. But Lex shut it down--shut  _ himself _ down--and Clark could only begin to imagine why.

“Would you like to sit down?” Lex asked him. 

“Sure,” Clark started to say, until his brain really processed the idea of placing his big, dumb body onto any part of Lex’s pristine living room suite. Every piece of furniture probably cost more than a car. But Lex was already leaving him, so Clark had no choice but to step out of the damp towel circle and follow, the soles of his boots squeaking on the floor. “Where do I put my towel--?”

Lex glanced back at him. “Just toss it with the others. I’ll deal with it later.”

On the floor? On the floor! Clark couldn’t do it. He stood there, and looked at the floor, and the towels, and the nice furniture, and quietly lost his mind. He didn’t even realize he’d stopped moving until he felt the weight of Lex’s gaze. He looked up.

Lex was  _ extremely _ amused. “Are we having a problem?” he asked pleasantly.

Clark felt his face screw up into an unflattering, petulant frown. “No,” he said. He threw his towel a little too hard onto the pile, then walked past Lex and--with stoic determination--sat down in the nearest luxury terror-chair.

“Incredible,” he heard Lex say behind him. Clark did not hunch down, but he wanted to. Lex returned to the offending towel heap and removed it from the room. Clark listened to his footsteps fade away down the hall.

“You know,” Lex called from somewhere in the bowels of the house, “I do have maids for this.”

“I would have picked them up for you,” Clark called back. 

Lex reemerged a few seconds later, his crisp shirt mussed and damp across the front. He walked over and assumed a careless, regal sprawl on the couch perpendicular to Clark. “I can’t have a super hero pick up my laundry,” Lex told him. “It’s gauche.”

“Were you really just going to leave that mess for your maids?” Clark wanted to know.

“Maybe. I’m very delicate. Physical exertion leaves me winded.”

“You are _so_ full of it,” Clark chuckled. Lex smiled at him, and Clark felt his heart stutter in his chest.

Oh no.

* * *

Nightwing arced from roof to roof on a series of bat-ropes, moving south, as Clark drifted behind him. In a strictly biological sense, Nightwing’s body shouldn’t be able to do the things it did, but then again, that was the entire bat family in a nutshell. Human limits were for lesser people. 

“...sort of danced around each other for a while,” Nightwing was saying.

“Yeah,” Clark answered. He turned a few lazy circles over in the air behind his friend. “I get that.”

Nightwing paused on a building corner, then took out a pair of binoculars to scan the street. He got them halfway to his face before he glanced up at Clark and laughed. “I guess it doesn’t matter if I look out for stuff, with you here,” he remarked. “Let me know if you see anybody down there who needs punching, okay?”

Clark’s face flushed. “Oh, no, I wasn’t, uh. I wasn’t really looking. Just listening to you.” That wasn’t quite true--Clark could only close his own ears and eyes off so much--but he didn’t really want to get into it. “I’m not trying to do your job or anything.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Nightwing reassured him. He gave Clark an easy grin. “I’m just not used to it, that’s all. The things you can do are a little hard to get my head around, you know?”

“Well, I’m not really that different from Wonder Woman,” Clark pointed out. “Or Green Lantern, when you consider--”

“They,” Nightwing interrupted, “don’t come hang out with me.”

“Oh,” Clark said.

“Don’t worry, I’m not exactly crying myself to sleep over it,” Nightwing replied with a roll of his eyes. He folded the binoculars up and tucked them back into his belt. “Anyway, what was I talking about?”

“You and Barbara, dancing around each other.”

“Oh, yeah. So, we did that for a while--and honestly, I think if I were her, I would have told me to get fucked. But she didn’t, and we just . . . I mean, there wasn’t like this one big moment, you know? It was more like . . . god, this is hard to explain. I guess it almost felt inevitable? Almost like destiny, if destiny were actually a thing. Am I making any kind of sense?”

Clark nodded. “Yeah. A lot, actually.”

“Oh, good.” 

* * *

“So,” Lex drawled, “what have you been up to? Besides wrecking another one of my labs, of course.”

Clark’s fluttering heart crashed back to reality. In spite of their moments together--in spite of whatever gains Clark thought they had made--Lex was still Lex, and Lex had been busy. The billionaire hadn’t let go of the Greenland virus; he’d just waited until Clark was off the scent, and then set the whole thing up again. In  _ Iowa _ .

Clark sighed. “I left the rocket this time,” he said.

Lex’s grin lit up the room. Clark found himself smiling back, which was not exactly the stern response that the situation demanded. 

“You must have found my note,” Lex guessed.

Clark had. A sticky note--a regular sticky note--pasted to the outside of the rocket with an industrial adhesive, written in Lex’s signature scrawl. 

_ Please don’t blow me up _ , it said. Clark had laughed so hard that he had to sit down. He found other notes, too: instructions on how to use his heat vision to neutralize the virus samples, and how to melt the lab equipment so that the waste wouldn’t contaminate the surrounding area. Each message was numbered.  _ You probably don’t want to kill everyone here _ , the first one began. 

“Yeah, I found all of them,” Clark told him.

Lex was pleased. “I did try to make them obvious. I also put a whole section in the lab safety checklist about them, so the technicians wouldn’t move them by mistake.” Lex allowed Clark a moment to appreciate his foresight. “There’s really no reason we can’t work together on this, after all.”

Clark clenched his teeth. “You making terrible things and me destroying them is not ‘working together,’ Lex.”

“Fighting smoothly, then,” Lex amended.

Clark stifled another sigh. “Sure,” he said. 

Lex watched him for a long second, then hopped back up from the sofa. “I’m getting a drink,” he announced. “Do you want one?”

“No,” Clark answered. He was annoyed, and dammit, Lex needed to understand that. “I don’t understand why--”

“Coffee? Tea? Red kryptonite?”

“Lex!” Clark snapped.

Lex raised his eyebrows. “ _ Superman _ .”

Clark tried not to mirror his expression. “This is serious.”

“And I’m seriously ignoring you. We’ve been over this before, and we can go over it again if you like. But I’m going to drink while we do it.” Lex turned his back on Clark, and headed for the bar across the room. “I’d suggest you join me.”

Clark put his head in his hands. He heard pouring and the clinking of glass. Lex hummed quietly to himself.

“I take it that’s a no?”

“Alcohol doesn’t do anything for me,” Clark said between his fingers. “Physically, I mean.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Tell me about it.”

Lex returned to the couch with some kind of mixed thing that smelled like lighter fluid. “Now. Do you want to lecture me, and I pretend to listen? Or do you want to argue?”

“I want,” Clark began.  _ I want you to be normal. I want you to care about something besides yourself, so that I can care about you without going crazy. _ “I want to talk about something else.”

The corner of Lex’s mouth quirked upwards. He took a swig of his drink; Clark watched the liquid burn down his throat. “What did you have in mind?”

* * *

The two heroes left downtown and moved to Gotham’s waterfront, heading east along the river, before they stopped for a break atop a warehouse. Nightwing balanced on a ledge and wiped at his brow. “Another fifteen minutes and I think I’m done,” he huffed. “I don’t usually even come down this far--next time, you gotta remind me to turn around at 50th.”

“I’m sorry,” Clark apologized. “I don’t really know your route yet.”

Nightwing leaned forward and stretched. “I might have to get you to carry me back, actually. Jesus.”

“That’s no problem,” Clark said quickly. 

“I’m kidding, Clark,” Nightwing laughed. He shook out his arms and took some deep breaths, but he was clearly past his limit. Every system in his body was exhausted. “Well, maybe I’m kidding.”

“I really will carry you.”

“I really might take you up on it,” Nightwing replied. He sat down, then gave up on sitting and flopped onto his back. Clark hovered above him. 

“Are you all right?” Clark asked.

“I’m good. Just give me a minute.” Nightwing dangled his leg off the ledge, out into space. Even Bruce wasn’t so casual with heights. “How’s the Luthor beat going, by the way? Seems like you’re settling into it.”

Settling in, that was one way to put it. “Yeah, it’s not so bad. I blow some stuff up, knock some stuff down, fight a robot. He rebuilds it all, and then I do it all again. Lather, rinse, repeat.” Clark paused. “Batman hasn’t yelled at me in a while, though, so that’s good.”

The muscles in Nightwing’s jaw twitched. “Lucky you,” he said tightly.

Clark knew that tone. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Nightwing replied, drawing out the vowel on  _ fine _ . “I mean, what can you do, right? You can’t make somebody listen to you.”

“Yeah,” Clark agreed. Boy, did he agree. “What’s, uh, what’s he mad about this time?”

“Oh, it’s nothing. It’s stupid, actually,” Nightwing said. “Just a totally normal argument on when it’s appropriate to brutalize a suspect, that’s all.”

Clark pursed his lips. “I’m assuming that Bruce was pro-brutalize?”

“You would be right.”

Clark landed next to his friend. “That’s . . . that’s not good.”

Nightwing was resigned. “That’s  _ the Batman _ .” He made little air quotes around ‘the Batman,’ then dropped his hands back to his sides with a resigned thud. “I mean, I get it,” he said to the sky. “I’ve seen a lot of awful shit out here, too. Sometimes you just wanna make somebody hurt for it.”

A siren howled below. Nightwing looked at Clark expectantly.

Clark listened. “Cardiac arrest. I think--yeah. They’re saying he’ll probably be gone by the time they get there. Nothing we can do.”

The siren faded away into the distance. Nightwing remained quiet. “It must be a lot, hearing that shit all the time. All the stuff you can’t change,” he said at last.

Clark sat down beside him. The quiet, endless drone of human misery slowly filled his ears. “It is.”

* * *

Three drinks down, and Science Lex was back with a vengeance. He had converted the coffee table in front of Clark into a demonstration space, which he filled with items that he found within easy reach: some pens, a paperweight, four paper clips, one mint, and of course, Lex’s constantly emptying and refilling highball glass. At the center of it all stood a cheap Superman action figure that kept falling over onto its heavy plastic cape. Lex had his sleeves rolled up like a magician. 

“I have to ask,” Clark said, as Lex adjusted the Superman toy for the tenth time, “where you got that.”

Plastic Superman fell over again. Lex took another drink. “You mean this awful little mispainted thing with the crossed eyes?” he replied. He plucked the toy from the table and swooped it through the air in Clark’s direction. “Dollar store.”

“ _ You _ ,” Clark said flatly, “were at a  _ dollar store _ .”

“I was looking for Superman toys,” Lex told him. He waggled the figure at Clark. “There’s tons of these out there, by the way. You need to manage your brand better.”

“I don’t have a  _ brand _ .”

“Tiny Superman begs to differ.” Lex placed the toy back on the table, then held his hands out over the assemblage. “Now. Multiverse theory.” Tiny Superman tipped onto his face. Real Superman felt similarly. 

“Lex, this seems awfully complicated,” Clark began.

“It’s not, I promise. Just pay attention,” Lex insisted. His hands hovered over the table, orchestra-conductor style. “Multiverse theory is just what it sounds like: it’s the idea that instead of one universe--the one we live in--there are multiple parallel universes which all exist simultaneously.”

“Exist where?”

“Here,” Lex said. “And not here.”

“ _ Lex-- _ ”

“Okay, okay. Think of it like television stations. Tons of channels, all broadcasting at once. Each channel is a separate universe. Make sense?”

“Sure.”

“But the real question is, what’s on the channels? And can you hop from one channel to another?” He picked up the Superman toy and began to move him between the pens and the glass and the paperweight. “Can tiny Superman move from our universe to another one, or would that movement collapse the system? Can a cataclysmic event in one universe affect the others? If pen universe is destroyed--” here Lex swiped a pen onto the floor, “--what happens to the rest of them?”

Clark picked up the pen. “This is an awful lot for a Wednesday night,” he said.

“I know, I know, but stay with me.”

“Oh, I’m with you,” Clark assured him. He put pen universe back on the table. “So, what’s in the universes? Like what’s in pen universe, here?”

Lex finished his drink. “Nobody knows,” he answered. Clark thought that he might have to take glass universe away from Lex soon. “The most basic multiverse models have everything starting at the big bang, with all of the same building blocks, and then every universe moves along on its own path. Some of them end up like ours, and some of them don’t. You’ve got universes where humans never evolved, or where we got wiped out early and replaced by squid--and then there universes that are almost identical to ours, with the same planets and the same people.”

Clark considered this. “So there would be other Supermans out there. Other Lexes.”

“Absolutely. And there’s...it can get very complicated. In the simple models, the universes are all parallel. They don’t interact; they just coexist. But in other models, they act more like tree branches. Every possible outcome in every situation births a new reality.” Lex paused. His blue eyes were unnervingly steady. “When I let you in here, ten thousand versions of us splintered off at once. Some of me never opened the door. Some of you never walked inside.”

* * *

Clark did have to carry Nightwing back home. He also had to listen to about a dozen and a half terrible ‘Superman Airlines’ jokes along the way, as if Nightwing were auditioning for a particularly insufferable comedy show.  _ Is there a movie  _ and  _ does Lois get frequent flyer miles _ and  _ when does the beverage service start? _ Clark suspected that Nightwing was deflecting attention because he was embarrassed at pushing too hard and wearing himself out. Clark could relate to embarrassment. He did his best to listen politely, and only threatened to drop Nightwing once.

As they approached his apartment, Nightwing directed Clark to one of the top-floor balconies. “It’s not Halloween, so. Can’t go in through the lobby,” he said. 

Clark laughed. “Do you actually do that on Halloween?”

“Fuck yeah, I do. The gals down the hall love my costume. Anyway--just fly down from the top, so nobody in the other apartments will see you. And uh, do it kind of fast, if you can. One of my neighbors likes to vape outside.”

“Absolutely.” They landed gently, with nary a vaping neighbor in sight. Nightwing hopped down and went to open his patio door.

“Thanks again,” he said. “I promise that next time, I won’t--” He pulled the door handle. It was locked. “What the fuck--?”

Clark heard a faint shuffle inside the apartment. He peered through the glass door and quickly spotted the source, a shadowy figure waiting for them inside the darkened living room. “You uh, you have a visitor,” he started to say. Nightwing looked up.

It was Bruce.

“Oh, come  _ on _ ,” Nightwing moaned.

Even though Bruce was dressed casually--street clothes, not the bat suit--he still carried himself as though he were wearing the cowl, and remained in the shadows. Nightwing banged on the glass. “Open my fucking door,” he ordered.

Clark thought that Bruce took a little longer than was strictly necessary to do so. Once the door was open, Nightwing shouldered past his old mentor in an angry huff.

“You left it unlocked,” Bruce said to him. 

“Of course I did. How the fuck am I supposed to lock it from the outside?” Nightwing demanded. He ripped off his mask and tossed it on the kitchen counter. “Did you climb down from the roof dressed like that?”

“No,” Bruce answered calmly. “I came in the front door.”

Nightwing glared at him. “You  _ broke in _ through the front door,” he clarified.

Bruce was not bothered. “You wouldn’t answer your phone.”

“I don’t have to talk to you,” Nightwing snapped. 

An ugly, tense silence hung between them. At that point, Bruce finally acknowledged Clark’s presence. “Kent,” he stated.

Clark gave him a lame little wave. “Hey, Bruce.”

“Clark, why don’t you . . . head out, okay?” Nightwing suggested. He looked absolutely, achingly tired. “I’ll text you later.”

“Right, yeah,” Clark said. He was already edging toward the door, and glad for the reprieve. “See you, uh, back at the office,” he called to Bruce. Bruce did not reply, so Clark took the hint and made himself scarce. A window-shaking argument began the second his boots cleared the balcony railing. 

“--going to fucking move if you do this again. I’ll move to fucking  _ Bludhaven _ , I swear to god.”

“ _ You _ chose this apartment. It isn’t secure.”

“Nothing is secure from you!”

“You left the back door open. Anyone could have--”

“I’m on the fifteenth floor!”

Clark put a few miles between himself and Gotham City before he could hear anything else.

* * *

Mint Universe clattered to the floor, joining Paperweight Universe and Tiny Superman under the couch. Lex didn’t seem to notice. “Was that on purpose?” Clark asked.

Lex glanced at him. “What?”

“Never mind,” Clark said. Lex leaned back into the sofa cushions. “You’re drunk,” Clark told him.

“I am. I am drunk.”

Clark began to refasten his cape around his neck. “You should go to bed,” he suggested.

“I should,” Lex agreed. He did not move. “I thought you were going to leave that.”

“Leave what?”

“Your cape. So I could study it.”

Clark stood up. “No, I said you could  _ look _ at it. I’m taking it with me.”

“Oh.” Lex seemed disappointed.

“Do you want me to put this stuff away?” Clark asked, gesturing to the table.

Lex squinted at the remaining knicknacks. It took him a moment to respond. “I sort of lost the thread on the multiverse thing,” he admitted.

“You did,” Clark said. He started picking things up off the floor. “But it was very educational. I learned a lot.”

Lex snorted. “Liar.” He stirred just enough to reposition himself on the couch. “Where did my glass go?”

“Back in the kitchen,” Clark answered. “If you’re thirsty, I’ll get you some water.”

“I don’t want water.”

Clark ignored that. He refilled the glass from the tap and brought it back to Lex, who accepted the offering with a haughty sniff. “You do drink a lot, you know,” Clark pointed out.

The older man stretched languidly on the sofa, his usual aggressive control dulled by the booze. “I don’t drink a lot,” he insisted. “I drink enough.”

“Sure,” Clark said. There was no sense in pushing it. He watched Lex’s heartbeat, absently. 

Lex took a clumsy sip of water, then shifted again, this time to his side. Clark removed the glass from his hand before Lex dropped or spilled it. 

“Do you ever wonder why we do this?” Lex asked him. 

Clark didn’t know how to answer that. He wasn’t even sure he knew what the question was. “Talk to each other?” he tried.

Lex shook his head. His eyes were sharp, but unfocused. “I mean this in general. You and me.”

“I don’t . . .” Clark began. Drunk Lex made even less sense than regular Lex. 

“This routine that we do. I make something, you blow it up, then you come here and we bullshit each other for three hours.”

“I don’t think our conversations are bullshit.”

Lex blew out a sigh. “That’s not what I meant.” Clark waited, but Lex didn’t elaborate. Clark pulled out his phone to check the time.

“I gotta go,” he told Lex. “I’m supposed to be in Gotham in twenty minutes. Are you gonna be okay?”

“I’m always okay,” Lex answered. He closed his eyes. “What’s in Gotham?”

“Oh, Nightwing and I do this thing on Wednesdays, like a midnight lunch kind of deal. There’s a bodega near him that’s open all night, so we get sandwiches and hang out on a roof.”

Lex smiled into the cushions. “You’re cheating on me,” he murmured.

“I’m not cheating on anybody,” Clark laughed. He might have said more, but Lex was already asleep.


End file.
